


Were We Not Called

by loquaciousquark



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Drama, F/M, Romance, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-10 04:39:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2011242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loquaciousquark/pseuds/loquaciousquark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since mortal love betrayed the Maker's bride, mortal lovers have been cursed with the name of their soulmate scarred somewhere into their skin. Sometimes this eases the heart's road. </p><p>Sometimes it does not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A few months ago, a kind anon sent me several links to some unfilled prompts on the kinkmeme. A number of them caught my eye, including this one: _Hawke/Fenris, soulmates. Everyone has the name of their soulmate somewhere on their body. It shows up sometime during puberty, but gives no indication of where the soulmate is or when they'll meet each other._
> 
> I've always liked this trope, so of course I was suckered in from the start. And now, even cleaned up as best it can be by Jade's generous and speedy beta and significant contributions to the summary, I have the dubious pleasure of presenting to you this terribly indulgent, mawkish, iddest of id-fic. I love it all the same.
> 
> Recommended soundtrack for this chapter: [I Need You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCuzUmdhGtw) from the Catching Fire OST.
> 
> Enjoy.

_Rom._         By a name  
I know not how to tell thee who I am.

— _Romeo and Juliet,_ Act II, scene II

—

Ah, at last. At last! She's finally become a young woman, full of promise and verve and a dozen new worlds opening up before her feet. Just the right time to bud into this new stage of her life! Now she will seize with both hands all the chances life affords a young lady of intelligence, of character, of beauty nearly surpassing her father's own—

Oh, _Malcolm_ , says Leandra in gentle reproof, and she covers her daughter's hand with hers where it's pressed to her chest. Her oldest, her first child already showing her own magic at fourteen, now come into the name lightly scarred over her heart.

Her daughter blinks back tears, turns her face away as Leandra slides aside the neckline of her shirt. The name itself is unfamiliar to her—certainly not Fereldan—and she touches the faint raised lines just a shade or two darker than her daughter's skin. Malcolm had hoped she'd be one of the few without one, but she'd beaten the odds as apostate already and Leandra supposes she's grateful, at least, that it's somewhere that can be easily hidden from prying eyes. They must be so guarded already; another secret to conceal would strain them all.

The whisper is barely a breath. "Take it away. Papa, _please_."

 _Ah_ , Malcolm sighs, and kneels before his daughter, and takes her hands in his own. It is not a thing to be taken. Not by magic or blade or burn; it is an old sorcery, from the days when Andraste walked, and will not be removed by mortal touch. To cut it away will bring it back in another place; to mar it with ink or scar will change its shape only for a day.

"I don't want it. I want to choose for myself."

Leandra does not touch her left shoulder where the name of her husband is written. Instead she bends forward, just enough to kiss her young daughter's hair, and then she tells her the truth: there is _always_ a choice.

"For both of us?" There is so much hope in her eyes.

Yes, she murmurs, certain. For her daughter, and for—

—

"Leto!"

He flinches, guiltily yanking his sleeve down over his wrist before he stands and turns. His sister's cheeks are bright with anger; her fists are closed knots at her sides. She says, "Where have you been? The master has wanted you a quarter-hour!"

He has been nowhere, staring at nothing he can understand.

Varania sees it in his face. She lets the tattered cloth fall shut behind her, closing away the glare of Tevinter's summer sunlight, her anger fading into shadow. "What is it?"

He does not wish to show her. For all her being the younger by two years her name had shown first; when their master had seen it on the pale curve of her neck he had brought all three of the slaves he owned with that name to his great hall and asked her to choose the one who would lose his tongue. She had not recognized any of them, neither the two boys nor the girl, and when her weeping had won her nothing but blows she had pointed, faint with horror, to the one farthest to the left. Leto still remembers the shrieks as he'd been dragged away.

His sister had not even known the name that had cost the child his speech, if indeed their master had kept his threat. No slave could read it; her master did not speak it, not to her, not to the slaves that he had brought before her. Leto has seen it twice: medium length, many curves, a sharp spiked character to end with, but after that day Varania has worn only high-collared dresses to hide it from the world. He does not wish to show her—

"Show me," she says softly.

He does.

It is a long word, tangles of smooth angled lines wrapping near the whole way around his right wrist. There are bits of sunlight arrowing through the gaps and holes of the old cloth hung over the doorway; Varania pulls him by the hand until a slender gold spar strikes his wrist. She turns his hand over and over and he allows it; she tells him, her mouth tight, "It will not be easy to keep this from the master."

He shakes himself loose, tugs his sleeve into place again. He does not like it when his sister sounds so— _old_ , when she has more worry in her thirteen years than their mother has known her entire life. He will not hide it. There is someone in the world who is his; even their master cannot take that from him.

"Hide it," his sister says flatly. "Forget it, if you can. It will kill you otherwise."

He inclines his head until her shoulders relax, and thinks: whatever else, he _will_ remember this.

—

She looks up at her father where he walks the path beside her, unable to understand. "But you didn't even _know_ her!"

He looks meditatively into the distance without slowing, fishing pole slung over one shoulder, Carver's three small fish on a line at his waist. The twins have lagged behind, their arguing voices just loud enough over the wheat field she knows they have not been lost to the summer heat. Still, she does not _understand_. "You didn't know anything about her. You didn't know if she was stupid, or if she loved someone else, or even if she liked dogs!"

"Of course," her father says, grave enough she knows he is laughing at her, "I was most worried about the dogs."

" _Papa_."

" _Euphemia_ ," he says in the same tone, and she pulls a face. Then, more gently, "Tell me. What are you so afraid of?"

She stops. Looks back down the narrow path between the golden wheat swaying to mark their passing, and farther, to the green wood that borders it and the creek behind it. She cannot meet her father's eyes. "What if I don't like him?"

"What do you mean?"

"What if—I meet him, and he has my name, and I—I just don't _like_ him? What if he's ugly and cruel and he… I don't know." She laughs, humiliated. "What if he doesn't like dogs?"

Her father says her name again. His face is very serious. "First, you must remember that the face does not always reflect the soul, and handsome men may be cruel, too. Second, despite—and perhaps contrary to—Ferelden's charter, it is entirely possible to have a happy marriage without a single dog in the home. And third—" he bends forward, enough that the fish at his waist slide down on their line, enough that the pole throws a slim shadow over her shoulder. "Your mother had the right of it. Listen to me. There is always a choice."

Her eyes sting. "What if I choose him, but he doesn't choose me?"

"Now that," he says, sighing, "is one of the great mysteries of the ages. It has lived long before you and me, daughter, and will live longer even than Maferath's curse. _But_ ," he adds with a grin, taking her chin gently in thumb and forefinger, "you bring me the man who won't have your heart, and I'll bring him to the feet of the Maker for you."

She laughs again, more easily, and before she can doubt herself she links her hand with her father's and turns them both down the path again. In the distance their home rises on the hill, the small square farmhouse made of gleaming honeywood, Mother's white Orlesian curtains in the kitchen window. "When did you know? With Mother?"

Her father turns up his face to the sun, a sudden summer wind catching at them both, brushing her hair from her eyes, teasing at his beard. "Before I even knew her name."

—

"But will it take?" his new master snaps impatiently, and Leto swallows down his apprehension as the artist pinches his wrist between two fingers. She looks wild to him, her hair nearly shaved and ink tattooed into her skin from knuckle to elbow, her eyes too pale for her face—but his new master is more frightening with every easy word, and Leto cannot suppress the shiver as he lays his fingers gently on the pulse-point of Leto's upturned wrist. "I'd have had an unmarked one if I could, but he's enough of a swordsman that I preferred the skill over the damage to his aesthetic."

The artist nods, digging the sharpened nail of her smallest finger into the name wrapped around his wrist. It— _hurts_ , enough that he wishes to pull away, but his master's hand is still on his hand and he does not dare. The woman's voice rasps like one stone against another. "How wide is to be the cut?"

"No more than this." His master shows the woman a page in a small book, covered in drawings and spidery indecipherable text. Leto cannot read it, can neither stop the sudden fearful pounding of his pulse where his master touches him—

The woman runs her finger down the page, then, unblinking, makes the same motion down Leto's arm, scraping a red line into his skin. "You will go here, Magister, between the letters. Branch at the bones of the wrist instead of the forearm."

"You refuse to remove it?"

"It cannot be altered. It is good that there is room here as it is; at eighteen already he has risk for scarring. If I were to shave off the skin it might return somewhere less easily avoided."

"And ruin my symmetry, you mean."

"Yes, Magister."

His master frowns, a slight pinching of the eyebrows that makes Leto's mouth go dry. He has already won this place at Danarius's heel, won his mother's freedom and Varania's too, and he had thought he knew the cost of it, but now—

"Leto," says his master, stroking his thumb along Leto's palm, pushing up, until he touches the very edge of the letters. "Do you know what this says?"

He licks his lips. "No, Master."

"Would you like to know?"

His heart slams painfully against his ribs. "Master, I would."

"What would you give me to reward you with such knowledge?"

A trick? And yet, he cannot lie— "Anything. Master."

"Mm." His master smiles, a thin-lipped thing as amused as it is dangerous, a serpent's smile, and moves his hand to cup Leto's cheek. His tapered thumbnail rests close enough that it brushes his eyelashes. "We shall see."

—

She wakes thinking of Leto.

It's not the first time she's wondered, nor even the first time she's dreamed of him—or what might be him—but there is something this morning that makes her uneasy, something different, something _wrong._ The house is still too close with her father's death; instead she takes up his staff and lets the eight-month-old mabari out behind her, and she sets off into the fields. It is early enough no one calls out, too close to dawn even for the insects to be out in force, and by the time she reaches the creek at the end of the path through the fields her breathing has begun to steady again.

The willow tree is still pale and young with spring, its branches dipping into the rippling water with a sigh at the deepest places; across the creek where the bank rises the cattails have begun to shoot slender green stalks from the rushes. Enough trees arch overhead to shade it cool even in summer, and it is up one of these she climbs, then onto the low branches that reach out over the water. The mabari pup bounds into the creek beneath her to set the tadpoles in uproar, shivering downstream and away from his overlarge paws. She settles with her back against the trunk, her legs outstretched before her, her arms crossed.

"Maferath's curse," she says aloud, and closes her eyes. The names are older, perhaps, than him, but the legend of his jealousy over his wife's marriage to the Maker and the curse that had arisen from it has always been both convenient and conducive to Chantry teachings on the Betrayer, and it is her own preference besides. Only something born from mistrust and the desire to possess could give rise to such a spell, as if knowing who fit a soul best might make that soul worthless without them.

Her own concern annoys her.

All her life she has been determined not to be guided by chance's scar over her heart. The Circle would not have her; this Leto would not either, not for nothing, no ownership given solely because some quirk of fate allowed his name a place on her skin. If he had arrived with intent to court her she would have permitted it; then, if she had felt that she could love him, or that he might love her, she would have given him the same chance as any suitor, the same expectation and respect awarded by choice and not demand. Her father taught her to cherish freedom; her mother taught her to cherish love, and she will not have one without the other.

And yet. And yet, with this disquiet in her mind at every thought of him, she cannot shake the sense that there is something wrong here, that whoever dares to harm him ought to know that he is not theirs to hurt. If she is to have his name—then he must have _hers_ , and no others, no others ought to raise their hands against someone marked to fit another heart!

She leans her head back against the tree, blowing out a breath that stirs her hair. He is not hers; he is his own. She cannot take that from him.

Besides, it is a dream and nothing more; and even were it truer there is nothing she can do for him from Lothering. More and more over the years she has become convinced he is not Fereldan, but beyond that she cannot say. No Fereldan farmgirl has ever been meant to roam the world's wilds with nothing more than a name.

Eventually, when the dragonflies begin to hum distant and low over the creek, and the sun begins to dapple yellow-gold across the water's rippling surface, and the dog curls panting at the tree's roots beneath her, Hawke allows herself to drop into a doze. She does not know his face, or his voice, or any part of him besides what he is called, but she knows that it is him all the same—

In her dreams, Leto cannot stop screaming.

—

They are scars, his master tells him, from his previous life: unimportant, and therefore to be ignored. There is no part of him that does not belong to Danarius.

He breathes assent. He _hurts_ —

His name, his master says, is Fenris.

—

A year passes, and then another. The worry fades, or becomes constant enough that it is as good as fading, and in time, she learns to put it from her mind.

Still. She does not forget.

—

He remembers nothing.

—

Regardless of the names scarred into their skins, very few in Lothering are willing to put aside their rising interests in courtship for the sake of a stranger who might never come, or who might come late enough it makes no difference anyway. The oldest Hawke girl is one of these; she smiles at them all and flirts with a few more, and when one day she comes mussed from the creek at the edge of town hand-in-hand with the blacksmith's son, no one is terribly surprised. They are a good match, both kind, if he a little gentler, and the town soon grows used to seeing them thick as thieves in the shadows of the windmill, in the ivy by the stables, walking with the younger two Hawkes to the great stone bridge at Lothering's western border.

Then, all at once, it ends. No one seems to know why; it is simply over, the two of them no longer smiling at one another, though he holds his arm close to his chest when she passes and she will not meet his eyes.

His name, they say sagely. Come into his name at last, and now he can't make himself settle for anything less. Even the Hawke girl, pretty as she might be one day, can't hold a candle to the missing half of one's heart.

So it goes, they decide, nodding at each other, those who have married their names drawing closer together, those who have chosen elsewhere gripping their lover's hands. So it goes, so it has always gone. Then the Blight comes, and courtship gives way to only war.

—

He doesn't think of the name on his wrist for a long time. Years, perhaps; a slave does not track more than the seasons by their turning, and Fenris has much to occupy his days now. He grows more proficient than ever with both sword and lyrium, learns too the words hidden in his master's lifted eyebrow, the slight turn of his lips. He hears, of course, other slaves speaking of their names, sees the unfortunates branded in places too difficult to hide from daily life: on the palm, the top of a bare foot, and in one hapless case the line of the man's jaw. Still, his master ordered him not to think of it, and so he does not…

It is the small things that bring it to his attention, in the end. The way his master's apprentice stares at him if he rubs his wrist after training. The way he is ordered to wear his gauntlets at all times when out of his master's chambers. The way, one evening, after his master has finished and he has been sent away, he realizes that his master's fingers have bruised him around that wrist and no other place.

After that he cannot forget it. When he is bathing his eyes go first to those scars as if one day he will abruptly comprehend their meaning; when his master says this name or that name he memorizes it, so that later he may try to map the sounds to the characters written in his skin. It is a small defiance, but it _is_ defiance, and when Hadriana finds him in the practice yard with his pensive gaze on his bared wrist and not his sword, he knows the penance will be nothing more than he deserves.

Still, it is harsher than he expects. His master is displeased and expresses that displeasure nightly for near two weeks. Hadriana binds him by his wrist in one of the cells beneath the estate and brings men and women alike before him, telling him each time that this slave bears the name that Fenris bears as well, or that one does, or that one. He does not trust her, _knows_ she lies, and yet—he cannot stop himself from searching every fear-pale face for some glance of recognition, of choking on fury and shame as those slaves are beaten and humiliated before him, as he is occasionally beaten before _them_ , until Hadriana's streak of cruelty is satisfied for the evening and he is left to lick his wounds in peace.

It is his own fault, he tells himself. A slave should not… he belongs only to his master. He knows this. He _knows_ this.

Then, one day, his master tells him over his breakfast that Fenris is to prepare for a journey to Seheron. It is the first time in near a month that his master's voice has come close again to kindness, and Fenris tries to breathe through the sudden swift relief that floods his heart.

—

There are rumors that darkspawn have been sighted to the south. Rumors, too, that the forces at Ostagar have been routed, and on the nights that Bethany cannot bear the wondering she crawls into her sister's bed and tucks her head under her chin, as if there is nothing in this storm that can breach the outstretched wing above her. Her sister bears the weight so easily, enough that Bethany forgets, sometimes, that she cannot stand against the wind alone, but Carver is her _twin_ and her sister is strong.

It is only for a time. Only for a little longer, and then Carver will be home and the world will go right again and they'll have something, at last, like peace—

—

The Fog Warriors decorate themselves with feathers and with dye, adorn the places where they are named with rings and gold and silver. Fenris's own has been a source of pain for as long as his memory reaches; they _cherish_ theirs, unashamed, and hide nothing.

He does not understand. He wishes to.

—

Her sister is dead. Aveline's husband, too, and when they sit curled in the bowels of the ship's dim hold she cannot stop rubbing the place on her ankle where _Wesley_ is written. Dead, she says, twice, the word hard and sick with grief, and Hawke buries her head in her knees when her mother begins to cry. Her sister is dead. Her father is dead, and her sister, and her mother blames _her_ and Carver blames her, too, and Aveline's husband is not even here to complain of escape alongside apostates. She cannot imagine the severing of souls Aveline suffers, the pain of knowing that he who fit her best has gone somewhere beyond her reach.

Bethany had had a name. She'd showed her once; it'd lain over her ribs, just at the base of her right breast, and it'd been something with so many consonants neither she nor Bethany had been able to make it out. They couldn't even tell if it was meant to be man or woman, and Bethany had laughed for ages at her rock-mouthed attempts at pronunciation.

She wonders if the person who has Bethany's name knows. If something had broken, if something had changed from one moment to the next, like a song ending just before the final note. She is glad, suddenly, that she has never met—

Leto lives. Of that she is sure.

Of all else—nothing.


	2. Chapter 2

_Romeo._ He jests at scars, that never felt a wound.  
              — _Romeo and Juliet,_ Act II, scene II

—

Kirkwall is a capricious city, a cesspit of swindlers and cutpurses alike who show themselves surprisingly honest about their chosen professions. It does, however, keep good handle on its mages, and when Fenris finds the dwarf in Lowtown who will contact a mercenary for him he decides it is as good a city as any in which to make his stand. He chooses for the trap a small home in the city's alienage, unused and abandoned at the moment, and commissions the penning of a letter to draw out Danarius's hired slavers. Then he goes to the roof of the lowest buildings nearby, his sword in hand, and waits—

Night falls. Lamps light in the windows and over doors in the alienage, throwing warm gold pools over the vhenadahl's venerable painted trunk, snaring here and there along the edges of the leaves that hang lowest in the square. The sky-choking smoke from the foundries thins as the forges go dim for the evening, thin enough that stars begin to shine through here and there, that the slivered crescent of moon gives him more view from his vantage than he expects. The elves go into their houses, laughing, and do not come out again; and one by one, seen only because he watches for them, slavers take up their places in the shadows of the alienage.

One with a whip by the door to the home Fenris has chosen—a half-dozen more in steel and dark-dyed leather that creaks with their movements in the alleys, in the unattended nooks behind the market stalls. And—he curses under his breath—a mage, staff in hand, eyes too watchful beneath his turban.

Well. He has hired this mercenary for a reason. There is little he can do about it now.

Then, movement. A woman in padded leather, tall and without hood or helm, three others behind her as he sees. A tall, broad-shouldered young man with a sour face and hair as dark as his leader's, a dwarf with a crossbow, a sturdy-looking woman in plate mail and a longsword in her hand. They look competent enough for all that they are strangers, and he means to watch longer as they enter the house, but—

He ought to have suspected the ambush and is annoyed at his failure, but regardless, it is short work to finish the lieutenant and his men where they wait on the long, narrow stairs to the city's docks. He even removes the bodies into the convenient sea beside him, leaving no mess for the city guard save the bloodstains on the stairway, but with the overloud conversation that had alerted him in the first place and the noisier crash of battle he does not linger to be discovered. By the time he has returned to the alienage the fighting is over, the square littered with bodies unmoving save the one armored captain still standing between him and—

For the first time, he sees the woman's face.

He knows her. He does— _not_ know her, has never seen her before in his life, and he—

The world has tipped beneath his feet. A towering winter wave has struck a cliff, suddenly and with no warning, and the earth has fallen away before him and there is nothing, nothing but an endless sea and no horizon. He opens his mouth and finds no breath to speak.

She steps forward, a quick motion that clenches a fist against his ribs, and her eyes are clear and unsettled as his own. She says, with a voice he has never heard before and that he _knows_ , "I—who are you?"

The captain's hand lands heavy on his shoulder, and Fenris turns without thought to drive his fist through the man's chest. He does not remember passing him on the stairs, remembers less why he matters. When he looks again the woman has not moved, though the tall man has stepped closer to her back with a dark scowl, and his sword gleams unsheathed between them. Again, her face alight with something he cannot name, the woman asks, "Who are you?"

It comes out less a statement than entreaty, and he hates himself for the hope. "My name is Fenris."

Her face falls. Her eyes close, just long enough for him to crush away the immense, inexplicable disappointment, and then she comes forward with outstretched hand to greet him. "Hawke," she says, with a smile almost bright enough to be true. "I'm Hawke. Pleased to meet you."

He takes her hand just long enough for civility, then steps back to safety as he explains the dubious circumstances of their meeting. She seems amiable enough, for all her—brother, it appears, glares, and the guardswoman frowns, and the dwarf makes acidic asides over the duplicity. He cannot shake the weight of her face from his mind.

His wrist _burns._

—

His name is Fenris.

His name is _Fenris_ , damn all the shadows of the Fade, and Hawke leans back in the rickety desk chair in Gamlen's main room. Fenris, who was a slave, and who dislikes mages and apostates even more. Fenris with white hair and green eyes, and tattoos made of raw liquid lyrium, who tore a man's heart from his chest before giving her an introduction, and Maker take her but she _has_ made strange friends in Kirkwall.

Fenris, whose name is not Leto.

"Shit," Hawke says aloud, and throws her arm over her eyes. Somewhere by the fire her mother tuts, though not with any real offense, and Hawke smiles despite herself. _Idiot!_ Known him all of four hours, and already groping for reasons to ask him to stay.

Ha. Groping.

Her chair jolts abruptly, nearly knocking Hawke from it as she scrambles to get it on all four legs again—and there is Carver looming upside-down over her, his preposterous giant's hands still gripping the back of the chair where he'd jerked it. "Still pouting?" he says, lifting an eyebrow.

"Yes," Hawke says shortly, leaning her head back to the chair's top crossbar as he lowers it safely to its feet. "What about you?"

"Always, to hear it from you."

"Well. I am an inexhaustible wellspring of veracity."

"Of something," her brother agrees, circling to lean against the desk. "You were hoping he'd be your name."

It stings to hear so blunt-spoken, and she looks away. "He's not."

"No. He's not. And if you plan to keep him in this little group you're building, you'd better decide right now if you're going to care."

"Your sympathy is overwhelming."

"And your judgment lately has been shite."

There is no humor and real anger in his voice, now, and Hawke stiffens fast enough the chair nearly topples beneath her. "You always did know how to end a conversation."

"A pirate thief? A runaway apostate Warden? This— _Fenris_? Are you collecting mercenaries or a sideshow for the Rose?"

"Stop it," Hawke snaps, lurching to her feet. "They're your friends as much as mine, and they're good at what they do, and—"

"And they're going to get you killed if you're not careful. Every single one of them is dragging danger in their wake, _sister_. One of these days it's going to catch up with you, and not even you'll be able to talk your way out of it."

Their mother watches them from the fire, silent and guarded; Gamlen stands with his arms crossed in the doorway. Carver's jaw is set harder than she's ever seen it. "So Merrill and Varric are my only Carver-sanctioned friends. Good to know. I'll restrict my visiting hours immediately."

" _Merrill_ ," Carver says, his voice wire-tight and spitting hot as oil, "is a blood mage. I'd have thought Da's lessons would have stuck for you, if no one else."

She flinches, startled at the hurt, and throws anger over the wound like a shield. "You're as friendly with her as I am!"

"I—" Carver starts, as red-cheeked with rage as she, but he cuts himself off mid-word and looks away, and just for a moment in his eyes she sees—

Her anger dies away like a banner torn from its post. She wavers, then sinks slowly to her chair again, and looks at her hands where she flattens them to the desk. She says, "You never told me."

His voice is as quiet as hers, though thrumming still with ire. "You didn't want to know."

"Bethany…" she starts, and dies away, her sister's name still sharp enough to cut knife-like into her heart. "Merrill knows?"

"The Dalish don't put as much stock in it as we do. She thinks it's charming."

"And you…"

"She's a blood mage, sister."

Hawke closes her eyes, blows out a breath. Her idiot brother, sullen as a child denied his favorite toy on his worst days, and noble when she least expects it, willing now to give up even this chance at contentment for the sake of their mother's safety and her own. "Should I change the groups?"

"No," Carver says flatly. "I'll manage. And so will you, because if you want to keep this Fenris around you'd better learn to control your own self before you chase him off altogether."

"You're an ass."

"Only around you."

She swallows. "It's just—I'm tired of waiting for him, Carver. Is that cruel to say? I'm _tired_ , and when I saw him, there was something—there. I had hoped…"

Her brother hesitates, and then his hand comes to rest heavy on her shoulder. At the fire their mother turns away; at the door Gamlen snorts and returns to the back room, where the dog sleeps, where he keeps his cheap Antivan brandy. There is nothing Carver can say to mend it, and they both know that, but to have him at her back all the same…

It helps.

—

It irks Fenris that he does not leave the city. Kirkwall has no ties to him save the tenuous links he himself has forged with Hawke and her friends, but all the same Fenris finds himself taking job after job, working with the guardswoman Aveline and apostates and abominations, and somehow when the opportunities arise for him to leave Kirkwall without complication he—ignores them. He has one more outing to the Wounded Coast. One more night in the streets of Lowtown. One more evening at the Hanged Man if he ever wishes to collect on the coin Anders owes him.

All the same, he thinks of Hawke as little as he can when he is not with her. She is _dangerous_ , this woman who wields magic as easily as her words, who laughs at all things and says _yes_ to all requests for her aid. Fortunate enough for him, he supposes, considering the circumstances of their meeting, but to see her lured by beggar after beggar when she has no silver even for her own meals galls him.

The worst, though, is when she makes him laugh.

It has not been a particularly difficult day, the smugglers on the docks surrendering rather than fighting to the bloody end. There is fresh coin in his pockets and Aveline and Varric are pleasant company today besides, and as they walk from the quartermaster's office he cannot deny that he is, in all respects, perfectly content. His guard is down and his awareness with it as he answers one of Aveline's questions, and that is the only reason he misses the first of the three steps down from the office's front door.

He staggers, one arm going out blindly, and even as chance closes his hand around Hawke's shoulder she's gripping him herself, steadying him by his elbow for the few seconds he needs to regain his balance. He shakes himself, unharmed but vaguely embarrassed, and then she says with the most exaggerated, wide-eyed shock he has ever seen on her face, "Fenris! I just saved your _life_!"

Six inches at the most. He steps down without further incident, his eyebrow lifted, and Hawke's feigned awe gives way to genuine amusement. Somewhere between her grin and the ludicrous situation he finds himself chuckling; it's rustier than he remembers, his voice unused to the practice, but it is a small thing and he _enjoys_ it and it is—

It is good. He wishes to have the opportunity again.

So he stays.

—

Anders's name is dead, he tells Hawke, one night in his clinic when she has once again stayed too late to travel home again safely. He fiddles with his clear, empty vials that will be used to store elfroot potion; she thumbs her staff and looks awkwardly at the empty cot across, not sure what to say to that besides her first, thankfully-stifled _did it hurt?_ But Anders seems disinclined to talk further on the subject, and she doesn't ask. Instead, she decides, she will only commiserate: she can't find hers, either, despite the looking, and even though she's graceless in the offering he takes her hand all the same and manages a smile and it's—

Well, it's a start.

—

Only once and very briefly does Fenris consider asking one of his new companions to read his wrist. He's gone without knowing long enough; surely it must be time he learned the word he's worn even before he can remember. He will not go to Hawke, but—Varric, perhaps, who reads many things, and may be trusted with Fenris's illiteracy.

He is halfway through the Hanged Man's boisterous evening crowd when Hawke's voice carries through the din. She's fighting with her brother again, or her brother is fighting with her, and as he adjusts his course to meet them he hears Carver say, mockingly, "Oh, _Eppie!_ Your _coattails_! I could _die!_ "

"You should be so lucky," Hawke snaps, her cheeks crimson, and by the time her patience has ended to send her stalking from the bar and Carver has signaled for another drink and begun to down it, scowling, Fenris is well away from them both and safe in the soft-lit warmth of Varric's suite. Not that he'd hoped _,_ but—he knows enough of words to know that one too short.

A conversation, he says only when Varric asks, between friends.

He's gone without knowing this long. He can wait a little longer.

—

She likes Fenris. She wishes she didn't; it'd have been easier to keep him at arm's length if he were intolerably cranky, or unkind to children, or afraid of dogs. But Fenris handles children as well as he handles all strangers—that is, with careful, deliberate distance—and seems to like her dog as well as any of the party, and she can't deny he has one of the more interesting faces she's ever seen. Not that she'd ever tell him that, considering he's as touchy about the lyrium as a cat to a bath.

Still. She likes him, and they work well together in a fight from the start, and at the end of the year it seems only natural to take him to the Deep Roads with her instead of her increasingly resentful brother. It's six weeks of the most miserable bonding experiences she's ever had, and then they come up into the sunlight, blinking, a lyrium idol poorer but with enough gold to buy her mother's mansion and the house next door besides, and she arrives home just in time to see her enormous tit of a brother go off to join the templars.

She hasn't been that angry at Carver at a long time. It's his choice, she tells herself, he's a grown man and it's _his choice,_ and when that doesn't help she goes by herself to the Wounded Coast and freezes one of its grey sand-choked inlets into ice a solid six inches thick until she's got her fuming under control. An hour, perhaps, or two. It doesn't help.

"Damn him," she says at last, and turns to see Merrill sitting perched on a rounded slate-grey boulder just up the path, her knees tucked to her chin, her gaze on the far sea. Hawke has no idea how long she's been there; long enough that her hair has been tousled by the winds off the bay, that she shivers ever-so-slightly in the late afternoon chill. "My brother," she tells her without preamble, "is an idiot."

"Oh, no," Merrill says, propping her chin on her arm as she folds them over her knees. Hawke's ice cracks with the push of a wave behind her. "Well, maybe once or twice."

"He's joined the templars."

"I know."

"I'm sorry."

"Really? I'm not."

Hawke blinks. Then sighs, and clambers up the path with the aid of her staff until she can lean against Merrill's boulder comfortably and look with her towards the horizon. "Of course you're not," she says. "Why not?"

"Well, he's doing what makes him happy, isn't he? He's gone to protect the mages who weren't as fortunate as your family. He told me so just last week, right before he left."

Carver! Carver, her bloody _fool_ of a brother, and even if he won't tell her the truth she doesn't think he'd lie much to Merrill. "I wish he'd mentioned that to me."

Merrill sighs as the wind picks up, a soft little bird-note of a noise, and her next words come muffled in her knees. "He was rather afraid you'd think it a betrayal."

Perhaps she had, until this moment. How difficult to love someone beyond words and to want at the same time to punch them in the eye. "He decided for himself. He's been very clear about not needing my permission." She hesitates, then adds, unsure, "I just… hadn't thought you'd be so willing to accept it, I suppose."

Merrill's surprised gaze on her cheek is a tangible thing, enough to make Hawke dig her staff into the gritty sand a little more securely. "Whyever not?"

"He's joined the templars. You're a blood mage. And he's—" _He's got your_ name _, Merrill_! "You know, he was almost called Maurevar. Could you have lived with that?"

There's a rustle as Merrill stirs on her perch, and then she says, "He's always known what I am. I can live without him; I'm whole within myself, and I don't need his love to give me life. But," she adds wistfully, "I suppose I'd… have liked to have it."

The sea blurs; her eyes burn. "Perhaps there's time yet."

"Perhaps," says Merrill to the sky, and her voice is very far away. "We both have so much to learn."

—

Isabela knows exactly as much as she wishes to about her so-called soulmate: absolutely nothing. She's met four women with the name and two men, and had sex with most of them, and ignored any hint of a scar raising itself beneath her fingertips. She's known the idea not to matter since she was fourteen, anyway, when a fistful of silver had decided for her instead. After that, she hadn't cared.

So she watches Hawke and Fenris dance around each other for _years_ , as if a few lines in their skin ought to have any bearing on what either of them wants, and it grates on her like a shallow reef because two people as intelligent as those should _know better_. The primes of their lives and attractive to boot, and they're wasting it fluttering over ghosts instead of having sex. Or better yet, having sex with Isabela.

 _Well_ , she tells Varric one evening, her booted feet kicked up on his desk, his bottle of white Nevarran wine propped comfortably against her thigh. Well, it's not her business anyway, no matter how much she might like it to be. If they'd prefer to dither until Hawke's as grey as Fenris is Isabela won't stop them. Mock them, certainly, but with love.

Varric snorts, leaning forward over his manuscript until she can just see the block B in the dip of his collar. They all know _his_ name—hard to keep that secret when it matches such a beloved crossbow—but the rest's as impenetrable as a ten-pin lock, and despite Isabela's confidence in her own expertise she doesn't mind leaving some doors unopened. Varric's shared enough of his wine with her already; she owes him.

(Will owe him more by the end of this, and Hawke, too, but she doesn't want to think about that.)

Did you ever? she asks him, suddenly curious. Want to try again?

He smiles; he shakes his head, pen not pausing in its work, and Isabela settles back, content. It's more than he's allowed her before.

Still, even knowing, she finds she's not terribly tempted to search out her own supposed one true love. The name at the hollow of her throat belongs to a fairy tale, a girl dead twenty years, a princess who fled her prison to live instead in the wild dark heart of the sea. Even were they to drag her ashore again, gasping, they would find her changed too far from who she was; made new in cockle shells, and seaweed, and the fine grit of a shark's skin to set a careless hand to bleeding. There's nothing solid in seafoam to embrace.

No. Isabela's body is her own, no one else's, and she'll choose who she likes when she likes and regret none of them, and if she has a missing half it's the grey waves of an early dawn on the ocean, stars just this side of fading in the sky behind her. Soulmate—no. She'll have a first mate instead.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Recommended soundtrack:** [I Need You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnhfyYwp2UY) from the Catching Fire OST. In addition, the lovely and talented wyvernfire was kind enough to draw some amazing fanart for this fic, which you can see [here](http://applejuice-and-hemlock.tumblr.com/post/93077751106/some-doodles-for-loquaciousquark-in-honour-of-her). Go leave her all the best comments!
> 
> \--

_Romeo_. I take thee at thy word.  
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd.  
—Act II, scene II

—

Later, Fenris will decide: it was the wine. He has no other excuse for the looseness of his tongue, no matter Hawke's propitious appearance on the anniversary of his escape. No matter the way she leans just too near, or smiles just too warmly at his inebriation. He has always been well able to command himself before.

Regardless, on this night he does not, and he tells Hawke of Seheron when he has told no other living soul the story. She listens, as he'd known she would (a peculiar thing to know of someone else), and does not hate him, as he'd _not_ known but suspected all the same (also peculiar, and surprisingly terrifying). The night ends well, despite his honesty, and then Hawke looks at him with a promise on her lips and she _smiles_ and he—

Fenris is not so coarse as to misunderstand her meaning. He knows what she offers, just as he knows how often she thinks of a name that is not his. Neither can he deny his own wish to know what word is on his own wrist, even with her company in the balance, and when she does not press at his deferral he considers the issue put aside for the moment.

(He is shocked by how much he _wants—_ )

Two weeks later, Hawke brings to him a book. In return he offers her more honesty, and more of his own secret shame, and as she has always done she takes them both in stride and gives of herself in answer. She will teach him to read. He will learn; he will find the secrets to the letters _himself_ , alone, with no other. It is a solution he has not once permitted himself to imagine.

All the same, he wonders, privately, how much more she can give before she is empty.

—

E. The first letter is _E._

—

Honestly, Leandra has no intention of eavesdropping. She's only trying to return one of the Amell genealogies to the library—she'd been thinking of Bethany, earlier, and wondering if she'd have been interested in such a thing, and one thought had led to another and she'd temporarily forgotten Great-Uncle Eustace's wife's name. Bernadine, as it'd turned out. And then she'd sat down at the dining table and started looking through all the old meticulously-mapped trees spidering out the generations, remembering the grander parties and reunions her parents had held for these relatives in this very house. The chandeliers gleaming, polished mirrors throwing back their light and more besides, the whisper of silk on silk and the glint of candleflame off cut crystal…

A far cry from the small, perpetually-muddy farmhouse in Ferelden. Still—the same happiness. She does not understand it.

By the time she comes to herself again she is three pages from the end of the book and looking at her own name in elegant, age-browned ink, and Gamlen's beside hers, and after a brief and pointed addition of her own she rather decides it's time she stopped wallowing and see about the here and now. She would like tea, if nothing else.

But a half-step into the library the voices stop her, and there is her daughter, her wooden armchair pulled crookedly to the corner of the desk where the elf sits: the quiet, marked one, perpetually cross, his shoulders bent, his back to the door. "It's a tough one," her daughter says, propping her cheek on her hand so that the afternoon sunlight falls better on the elf's open book. "Try letter by letter, first."

"F-e—," he begins, slow and stilting, and Leandra knows this is not something she ought to hear, not like this; and yet, somehow, she cannot move. "Vee—"

"Mm," her daughter says, so gently Leandra can hardly recognize her. "It's rounded."

"U," says Fenris, his head bending a little closer to the page. "Dee." Softer murmurs she cannot hear as he sounds the letters to himself, one by one; then, "Feud. Of course."

"Of course."

One narrow shoulder shifts, the dark fabric of his long sleeves not quite hiding either the strength or the peculiar lines beneath. Leandra hardly knows _him_ like this either, so used is she to seeing him in the door to Gamlen's home with a sword and a scowl and, not infrequently, bloodstains. He is so much safer without the armor. "These—vowels—are aggravatingly inconstant."

Her daughter leans nearer with a conspiratorial smile, a better fit for her face than her previous gentleness. Her hair is very dark against the elf's white, though the room's warmth softens them both, and somewhere between the twitch of a grin and the shrug of one shoulder she looks—

She looks, Leandra thinks with a sudden ache, like her father. "Naturally," she says, teasing. "They're tricky things, those Us."

The elf glances at her daughter, one eyebrow lifted, and suddenly they are very close and her mouth is still shaped around the letter; in the space between one caught breath and the next something _changes_ in Fenris's face, and her daughter's eyes soften, and Leandra thinks, oh, _no_ —

Her escape is curtailed by her own elbow. It knocks against the door's handle, not loudly, but it is a noise where there was previously silence and by the time Leandra dares to look up again Fenris is straight in his chair, his face schooled to perfect politeness. Her daughter sits primly beside him, her throat ever-so-slightly flushed—but so are the very tips of Fenris's ears, and Leandra is, despite her own embarrassment, gratified to see it. Still, her smile remains satisfactorily suppressed, and though she knows her own cheeks are not quite cool, she manages to greet them both, cross the library to replace her book, and exit again without further incident.

All the same, she takes a moment to lean against the smooth-stone wall just outside the door as their low conversation resumes. Her daughter has clung to _Leto_ so long as both shield and noose together, unable to either accept or ignore the name scarred over her heart. For her sake, Leandra had hoped—but. Her daughter's eyes have changed for this elf, regardless of his name.

Oh, Malcolm, she thinks, and touches the curve of her shoulder. Whatever am I going to do with her?

Even now his voice is so clear in her head. His name will not be one that fades.

_Wish her luck, my darling. And, for the Maker's sake, keep her in the will._

—

Wesley's name is fading.

By the time Aveline notices it's already half gone, the letters written just above her right ankle barely noticeable now to her questing fingertips. It's enough to make her stomach turn over twice as she twists in the quiet of the barracks, trying to see, but even in the dim moonlight of her room she can tell the change. His name is fading. His name is fading, and save his shield she will have nothing left.

Aveline lies awake that night, her legs bent beneath the sheets until she can cover her ankle with her palm. She has known his name since she was fourteen, has kept it with her every step she's taken, to Lothering and Ostagar and then to Kirkwall, even if its bearer had not joined her at the last. She'd known him from the first moment she'd laid eyes on him in templar steel. Good work it'd been, and she'd been trying to find its maker...

She cries, stills, cries again, falls asleep at last somewhere near third bell of the morning. She wakes grieving, and wishes she felt more grief; she wishes too that she did not know the name of the man who even now supplanted her husband in her heart.

Somewhere near ninth bell the Chantry begins ringing for services, and Aveline abandons her futile attempts at rest and moves to the one small window to her room. It overlooks one of the main thoroughfares to the Chantry square; for some time she watches couples pass, and families with small children, and friends with good cheer in their voices as they greet each other in the clear midmorning light. Then she writes to Hawke's mother, because she has no one else, and at her reply that Hawke is indeed gone out to the Coast Aveline goes to the estate and sits with a cup of tea and tells Leandra about her husband.

She leaves nothing out that she can remember. The shape of his hands; the sound of his voice early in the mornings; the way he looked when he smiled, as if his happiness had always caught him by surprise. How much she hated his proclivity for denting the floorboards with his boots. How much she loved him. Still loves him, despite the writing gone weak in her skin.

She betrays him now, to think of another in his place. Doesn't she?

_No,_ Leandra tells her, folding her into an embrace she hasn't known since before her father died. Never betrayed, _never_ supplanted. Hearts are such elastic things for all their fragility; no matter the scars, when love comes, there will always be a little more room for it to grow.

—

Hawke only wants embrium. It is only a small sojourn, not more than an hour. Nothing dangerous, certainly, even for the regular hazards of the Wounded Coast.

Then slavers emerge from the hills, and Hadriana smiles, and Fenris—tries—

—

He can hardly understand what's happening. He knows that he'd come to apologize, and that somehow the conversation had turned under his feet and he'd shouted and Hawke had shouted, and then his arms had been around Hawke's waist and her hands tangled in his hair and she had _kissed_ him, and he'd kissed her, and now—

And now they're halfway up the stairs to her room, and he doesn't know how.

He says her name. She glances back at him, her eyes bright, her lips parted—and instead of freeing himself he moves up the stairs to meet her, crowding her against the wall, gripping her arms to keep her still. She laughs; he smiles, pleased as he can remember being, and kisses her until they neither of them can breathe. How long has he waited for this?

They are at her door, then through it, and then she is in his arms properly and it is as much as he can do to keep his mind his own in this moment. It is not right that she has such power over him; it is dangerous beyond reckoning that her mouth on his should feel like coming home, that for the first time in his memory he thinks he might be nearer whole. To give someone else such a hold on him, even Hawke, even—

" _Fenris_ ," she sighs, and he is lost.

His chestplate goes first. Then his belt, and then her own, and then her fingers hook into the cuff of his right gauntlet and his mouth abruptly stills on her throat. He is named. So is she, and regardless of where this night will lead he will not lose this piece of himself, will not allow Hawke to risk—what, he doesn't know. He only knows he must— "Wait."

Her teeth close gently around the base of his ear; he shudders, leaning into her without meaning to. "What?" she echoes.

"You are—I have— _stop_ this, Hawke!"

She laughs, a low husky thing he's never heard from her before, and relents. Firelight dances in her eyes. "Cold feet?"

Nothing of him is cold. His hand closes convulsively around his own wrist between them, enough of his concern in his face to sap the smile from Hawke's. He mourns and welcomes that at once. "Hawke. I have a name."

"So do I." She looks down at his hands, then up again, lust ceding to apprehension. "I—does that matter?"

"No. Yes. Hawke—"

She bites her lip. Then: "Wait," she tells him, and moves to her cluttered nightstand where a half-dozen books lie stacked. From one of them she pulls a length of fine red fabric used to mark her place; this she brings to him, her throat flushed, her fingers wrapping around his right wrist through the steel. Even still the lyrium burns white as a brand; he is dizzy with want. "Here?" she asks, meeting his eyes, and he—nods.

Somehow he finds the hidden catches, flips them one by one. Steel loosens, then comes away; his bared fingers flex in air and Hawke kisses him and the cloth comes around his wrist in one motion, heady and bewildering, enough to strip him of sense and objection alike. His heart pounds so hard he marvels she cannot hear it. She pulls away to breathe and he chases her, appalled at his own desire; he cannot taste her enough.

A slight tug at his wrist tells him it is knotted. He glances only once to see the letters hidden safely behind it (E, he remembers) and then Hawke's hands are clenched into his shirt and his own have caught somehow in her robe, and she's smiling at _him_ , no hesitation, no shadow of reservation he can see.

He wants beyond words to hold her. He says, when she asks, _yes._

—

It is a mistake.

He should not have looked. The seeing had been unavoidable, Hawke's bare skin too captivating to ignore; he had been striving for—care, if not gentleness, but she'd thrown back her head into her pillow and he'd dropped his mouth to her throat, and there, just under the sloping rise of her collarbone—

A name. Short enough even he might memorize the shape of it, no matter how much he might wish otherwise. She had not tried to hide it; he cannot hide from it either. Cannot hide _anything_ , not when the end comes for them both and her fingers clutch into his shoulders and his mouth closes on hers and he cannot hide, cannot think, can only want a lifetime and more of this sudden surety. This is where he is meant to be. This is who—

Hawke laughs into his chest after, breathless, and even then Fenris cannot keep back the smile, even if it hurts in the giving where it had been so easy before. Her lips slide over a line of dimming lyrium and that aches, too, that he should be so taken by a mage and feel no regret at the taking. He should not be so certain in his heart that this is right.

He should not feel such _peace._

_—_

_Leto!_

_A girl, red-haired, younger. A slim woman with grief in her eyes, and gentleness worn from long labor._

_Leto!_

_Slender hands on his hands. Narrow light, hot and familiar. Hide it. Forget it, if you can. It will kill you otherwise._

_He will not forget—he will not forget—he will not—_

It is gone before he wakes.

—

Hawke still sleeps, her cheeks flushed, her hand curled by her mouth. And there, just above the pale line of her arm— _Leto_ , as burnt into her skin as his mind. He cannot explain the rush of rage at the word, and terror, and grief; it sweeps over him like a storm over a ship's rail, beating and beating until he capsizes. He cannot—he _can't—_

He cannot do this.

He is named elsewhere. So is she, and he has heard her often enough on the subject to know she is not capable of ignoring it forever. She will seek him out eventually, this Leto, and just as before Fenris will find himself abandoned on some nameless shore with no warning, no hope, no chance at his own defense save the lyrium and his own empty hands. It will break him. And even if Hawke is the one who does the breaking it will wound her, too, to be so divided, to do harm to one he knows she considers a friend—but all the same there is a scale between them, small and gold and weighted, and Fenris knows whose name will tip the balance in the end.

He cannot allow it. For his own sake, and for Hawke's—he must cut her away now, unmoor her from the anchor that is his company, set her loose before the cutting will kill them both.

(It almost, he thinks, slipping from her sleeping side, collecting his discarded armor until he is warded away from her touch again, feels true.)

—

Regardless, Fenris cannot return the red cloth band around his wrist. He knows what it hides.

He knows who tied it as well.

—

Ah, Varric thinks, when between one day and the next the elf and their fearless leader stop speaking to each other. It's all become awkward distance and wistful glances chanced only when the other's not looking, and Varric's written enough of these stories to know the next chapter's general arc. He doesn't even care that neither of them has ever been good at sticking to their scripts.

Which reminds him to retrieve his latest manuscript from under Rivaini's bed. She hadn't been particularly subtle lifting it the other afternoon, but she likes being chased occasionally when there's no risk of prison time at the end of it, and he doesn't mind doing the chasing. It means he has to spend a little more time sorting his edits from hers, especially when she bothers to mimic his handwriting, but he appreciates her ingenuity if nothing else. He's never seen so many creative uses of the word _throbbing_.

Besides, he doesn't mind these little things. They don't cost him anything but time, and Maker knows he's spent enough of it—and coin besides—keeping the rest of Hawke's merry band out of trouble. Between Daisy's twine and the elf's borrowed mansion and the misdirection of Blondie's templars he doesn't think he could have found a more expensive group of friends, but—well. Some of them need more looking-after than others, and now that Hawke's distracted…

Well. Now that Hawke's _distracted_ , it'll fall to him to watch over them all for the few weeks it'll take her to bounce back. She's never been one to wallow long, heartbreak notwithstanding, and soon enough she'll be herding them all back to the safety of her nest, even the elf, where she can spread her wings over them and take the brunt of the storm herself.

He sighs, dropping his penknife into the jar at the edge of his workbench, and holds Bianca to the light. Her stock gleams gold and oiled, as she should, and when he thumbs the crossbar her hinges slide without the whisper of a squeak.

_Excellent_ , he thinks, satisfied, and lets her weight rest on his arm as he clears the rest of the bench. He won't pretend this'll be easy for Hawke—or for any of them, really, chasing names and ignoring them and longing for them without understanding the cost of it. _He_ knows their price, after all; experience has taught him that if nothing else. There's a reason he's got monikers for most of them, and it's not just because they fit.

But he's got better things to do than brood, and Bianca's never been a patient lady; and even though he knows Isabela will be inside in a matter of minutes, he locks the door behind him.

—

An H. And another E, and then M and I, as Isabela's name begins—

—

Anders dreams of her, sometimes. The face is never clear; sometimes it is Hawke's, and sometimes a younger, sweeter one, and sometimes only a dark void, but—he knows the voice of his name. He'd heard her pray on the day he'd felt her die: a short plea to the Maker that had not saved her. He had resented her for that, at first, even as he mourned with the silent shock of a limb suddenly wrenched away. Later, he had understood it better, when Justice…

Justice had not understood this mortal fascination with what they called themselves. His own name, after all, had been chosen in a moment's thought after a mortal virtue he wished to embody; he has never felt the call of another soul across a country and farther, never understood the spike of total terror when that call had abruptly gone silent, like a black curtain had dropped abruptly over a sunlit window. There'd been the slightest echo when Hawke had walked into Anders's clinic that first day, enough that he'd thought—maybe—but days had become weeks had become years, and he'd seen soon enough where she turned first after a battle.

Anders pushes up from his desk, weary to the bone, and cracks his back with a sigh before heading to the clinic proper. Only two overnight patients this week, one a heavily pregnant woman at risk of a bad birth, the other a man who'd lost an eye in a mining accident. They are both asleep—unsurprising, given the lateness of the of hour—and when his cursory check reveals no new strain he moves to the small, overburdened shelves at the clinic's far end. One of the ward's few windows is set directly above, just large enough to allow fresh air from the sea and enough moonlight to see by, and Anders runs his fingers along the cracked, worn shelves in silence.

Enough healing poultices for two weeks. Well-stocked on valerian, embrium, and elfroot alike; he's short on spindleweed and Mythal's Favor, but Hawke should be going out again soon, and she won't mind—

His hands grow still on the half-empty jar of spindleweed. Its glass curve glitters with dim, blue starlight, and he rubs his thumb along it absently, testing the silver screw-cap until it catches on his nail. Hawke had come to him a few days after, her eyes too determinedly cheerful and her voice a bit too bright as she'd dropped off that week's baked goods from Orana. Anders hadn't asked, hadn't wanted to know; then Isabela had told him anyway, shaking her head, flicking a sovereign between her knuckles as if that might distract them both.

He doesn't care, he tells himself. It's none of his business what she does with the elf; it's certainly no right of his to be bitter that she can forget her own name so easily, can let the one who might even now search for her languish in anonymity. He wishes he could do the same.

Anders shakes his head, grips the jar so that the spindleweed inside it trembles. His name is dead. No one's fault, save perhaps the one who killed her; he can't begrudge another for choosing to search elsewhere. But—that it was the _elf_ , though, and that it has ended as poorly as Anders had always thought—

_Enough_ , says Justice without anger. _Enough. This is not your place._

_Not yours, either,_ Anders thinks acidly, but the pregnant woman stirs in her sleep and he puts Fenris and spindleweed alike from his head for the moment. Eventually, when she is calmed again, he takes himself back to his small office and the smaller bedchamber beyond, crammed wall-to-wall with a tiny writing desk and a cot he is too large for. His feathered over-robe hangs from the back of the door; exhausted, he pulls his linen shirt over his head and tosses it to the hook to join it, unable to muster any particular concern when it lands on the floor instead. His trousers follow, the seams giving at his knees, and he has turned only a moment to check the lock when the flash catches the corner of his eye—

It's the cracked shaving mirror he's propped on the desk, no larger than a noble's portrait hanging in one of Hawke's well-lit hallways. He'd moved just so that the moon had thrown its white gleam into his face; now, with his shift out of place, the world has gone dark again, safe again, with no light.

He sighs at the thought, closing his eyes. He does not need to see to know what the mirror shows now when he turns his back again, now that the polished glass has found each curve and bump of his bared spine. He can see it even in the dark: his _name_ , in the very center of his back, set just so that no matter how he strains he will never reach it.

_Bethany_.

—

"There were _lilies_ ," Hawke tells him, framed by his door, her eyes wild, and Fenris cannot do anything but take up his sword and follow her.

Later, when death has come and taken another from Hawke's hands, he is trapped again, indecision keeping him in her home, fear stopping him at the foot of the silent stairs. It alarms him that he should feel her grief so sharp in his own heart; it is perilous beyond measure for a slave to heel so closely to a mage, even Hawke, even if Fenris follows not in chains but in choice.

She says his name when he reaches her doorway. He stops there, waiting for—dismissal, or command, or plea, but instead she turns so that her back is to him, one hand clutched over her mouth, her shoulders bent as if she has gone old before her time. Her fingers are still stained with her mother's blood; the fire in her hearth burns it redder than life, and the same chill that had gripped him in the foundry takes hold once more.

"Hawke," he says, stepping nearer as if her sorrow is a physical thing to pull him, and she flinches away.

"Don't," she breathes through her hands, muffled enough that he must come even closer to be sure. "Oh, Fenris, _don't_."

"Do you wish me to go?" Let me _stay_ —

"I'll burn you. Andraste, help me."

"Hawke?"

She whirls, her hands clenched at her own throat. "I'm losing it," she says, and her voice cracks. "I've never lost control of my magic in my whole life, but it's running through my fingers like sand. I can't—Mother—my mother's dead, and I can't—" The words choke off, Hawke's throat closing, and even as Fenris comes nearer she clenches her eyes shut, tears sliding from their corners over her cheeks. He has never seen her cry like this before.

Her fingers spark when he takes her hands, a quick ember-flare upwards and then vanishing into smoke, and then her hold on him tightens as if she will be lost without this tether. Fenris doesn't mind; when she staggers and goes to her knees he goes with her, not relinquishing his hold, no empty platitudes to comfort one for whom there is no comfort. Her forehead strikes his shoulder and stays there; her shoulders heave in thick, heavy, soundless sobs, shadows flickering gently across the ceiling as the hearth-fire flares and dies with her unrestrained magic.

The lyrium flickers with it, striping white as daylight when her control grows weakest. Fenris does not care; it is what he has been meant for. He will not let her go.

The better part of an hour passes before Hawke's sorrow begins to ease. His arms have found their way around her shoulders, her waist, holding her against him as tightly as she can bear it; she grips his shirt between them as if to pull herself even closer. His shoulder is damp with her tears.

"I'm sorry," she says quietly, grief-thick and hoarse as if she has been screaming.

Fenris shakes his head, does not relinquish his hold when she starts to pull away. The fire has warmed the soft Orlesian carpet beneath their knees; the room is quiet, and dim, and too full of shadows for him to leave her now. "Be still, Hawke."

"My mother's dead."

He looks away. "Yes."

"She was all I had."

"Carver lives."

"Carver, _templar_."

"Your brother," he reminds her, and fights back the sudden memory of Hadriana's voice. _You have a sister—_

"He will hate me," Hawke says flatly. "I was supposed to protect her."

Fenris has no answer for that. He cannot say _you tried_ , not with _and failed_ behind it; neither can he pretend to understand the link between two siblings so strained by death and loss. In the end he can only offer what he has: the truth. "I don't know what to say, but I am here."

She snorts half a laugh, her face turning into his neck. It is more than he expects, and as she moves he catches a glimpse of his own hands on her back, of the red band that still wraps around his wrist where his name lies. "For how long?"

Fenris closes his eyes against the truth, against the choice _._ "For as long as you have need of me."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended soundtrack for this chapter: [Tenuous Winners Returning Home](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHxYpnaaw3s) from the Hunger Games OST.

_Romeo_. It is my soul that calls upon my name.  
—Act II, scene II

—

Time passes. The sun rises over Kirkwall and sets again, one day after another, and somehow the glass-sharp shards of her heart begin to wear down to something less likely to cut her bleeding with an errant thought. It helps that Kirkwall allows little time for private grief; mourning must wait when the qunari set flame to the city in the night, and must wait again with her convalescence after the Arishok's battle. Then there are ceremonies and galas at which she can barely stand, where she is given another name to add to her list: Hawke, Amell, apostate, Champion.

Fenris—helps. He refuses to attend the parties of Kirkwall's elite, which is not unexpected, but he does not hesitate to offer his arm as she begins to walk the slow road to healing after near-evisceration. Once Anders clears her of all restrictions Fenris begins coming to the estate three and four times a week, guiding her in the small exercises made to help the weak to build their strength again. It is exhausting and occasionally humiliating, to be so reduced before him, but it is easier to laugh at those times than any other since her mother died, and for that alone Hawke is grateful.

After she is as healed as she will ever be, he—continues to visit. Not as frequently, but regularly, and because they must both have a reason that he comes the reading lessons resume for the first time in a year.

"Lee-adder," he says one evening, his longest finger on the open page, and Hawke's heart jumps without warning. "Leader. The leader's s—pfaugh. Sword. I tire of these silent letters, Hawke."

She smiles, gives some answer that makes him smirk and eases the lines around his eyes, but she cannot shake the disquiet settling around her with the soft smothering weight of a mantle. Her days have been so full between her healing and Isabela vanishing and her new duties and _Fenris_ that she had not realized—

She has not thought of Leto in months.

—

For years, Donnic had been sure he was meant to be unmarked. There'd been a brief period in his adolescence that he'd allowed himself to resent it, watching the names rise on his friends and then his younger brothers, one by one, each of them relieved and embarrassed and glad alike to know they had a match somewhere in the world. His mother, however, had had little tolerance for his own wallowing, and on his fourth week straight cleaning his father's armor he'd decided it was time to let it go. It would come, or it would not; his own annoyance would not change that.

He can't pin down the moment he had realized he didn't mind. He'd only realized it at a friend's wedding; he'd been watching them duck under the flowered archways together, laughing and clapping with all the rest, and between one word and the next he had thought, surprised at the revelation: _I do not need it_.

He would like it, certainly; his parents had been too happy together for Donnic to dismiss marriage and family altogether, but—such things happened, and no missing half to his soul meant, perhaps, that he had a whole one to offer to the right person instead. Still, he had not pressed, had not _searched;_ if he was not meant for that kind of life-ending love he would find another kind in its place.

And he had. He'd joined the city guard. His father had approved; but more than that he'd found a _family_ there, his brothers- and sisters-in-arms as dear to him as his own blood. He'd loved them then; he loves them still, even if Brennan is doing her level best to clip his wedding-neat beard every time he looks away. But such are sisters, even guardswomen, and he is marrying today whether his beard is there or not. He doesn't mind.

Aveline had asked him, once, if he'd minded marrying a woman who'd carried another name before his. _No_ , he'd said, easy and true, but even then he could see she hadn't believed him. He'd laughed, taking her hand, and reminded her: _she_ was willing to marry the man who, upon waking with his name come in at last, had stormed out half-dressed and accused Brennan publicly of trying to play jokes on him in front of the new captain.

That had been the day he'd learned how fiercely his captain could blush. She'd blushed as he'd retold the story, too, smiling all the same, and leaned forward to kiss him, and oh, he'd loved her—

No, he thinks, squaring his shoulders, letting Fenris pull the doors open ahead of him with real gladness in his face. Donnic had waited thirty years to learn his name; now that he has he regrets nothing, not the waiting, not the first moments of embarrassment and awkwardness that came and went as swift as a bird on the wing. There is more to a life than romantic love; he has spent his time until now learning that, learning how to be brother and son and friend alike. He will be a better husband for it.

Aveline stands across the aisle in gold and white, Hawke at her elbow, marigolds in her hair lit by the shafting sunlight to yellow flame. She is— _beautiful_ , he thinks, dazed, and then she _smiles_ —

She takes his hand when he offers it, and there is not a name in the world that matters.

—

Eu, as in feud. The _ph_ sound is harder; it takes some time to remember that those two together are F, as in Fenris, and that — _ia_ at the end does _not_ blend like the others but is pronounced each sound on its own. He knows the letters already, and he is so close to the whole…

—

Her library is so quiet. Not that Hawke minds—it's been a long time since any part of her house felt peaceful—but even the streets outside the opened windows are quieter than usual, the fresh spring breezes seeming to soften all but the nearest conversations as they pass. Orana had brought in watered wine earlier, chilled enough that the silver belly of the carafe had beaded with the sunny warmth of the room; Hawke pours herself a half-glass as Fenris turns the page, resting one hip on the back of the couch where he sits with an old genealogy of her family in his lap.

"I still don't understand why you're reading that," she says at last, idly watching a pair of starlings swoop from their nest in the neighbor's eaves. "You said the _last_ book was dry."

"I have found names to be the most… challenging," he admits, and turns another page. "It seems anyone may alter a sound as they please if it's to do with what they're called. How is this said?"

She leans over the back of the couch to see, glass held carefully to the side. "Olivier."

"Orlesian."

"I think so. Mother didn't talk much about those uncles."

He makes a noncommittal noise and turns the page, and between one moment and the next he grows totally still, as if he has rooted, as if the thin clouds passing over the sun have turned him to stone in their shade. He says, his voice awful as she has never heard it before, " _Hawke_."

She sets down the glass on the carved side-table, alarmed. "What is it?"

Fenris lifts his eyes to hers. She cannot read them. "What is your name?"

"What?"

"Your given name." His eyes close and open again, sharper, and she is trapped, struck as he is, abruptly reduced to the smallest spare points of light and touch: the sun-glint on his white hair, her own heart beating hard and quick in her throat, the fine damask of the couch gripped beneath her fingers. The book still lies open on his lap, and even from here she can read the thin elegant lines that draw out her mother's name, and her husband Malcolm's; and the name of their oldest child, born in Ferelden…

She says, her voice trembling, "Euphemia."

"Called—"

"Eppie. I—I always hated it, growing up."

Fenris shudders. His head bows forward until she cannot see his eyes; the book slides from his lap to thump softly to the carpet by his bare feet. His hands have clenched on his knees hard enough that his knuckles have gone white. His wrist still bears the red band—

A Tevinter curse breaks the library's quiet into glass. Then again, sharper than the first, and Hawke shuts her eyes against it, knowing why, understanding seeping into her heart like a cracked cistern, slow and cold and clear and totally impossible to evade. The couch shifts beneath her hand as Fenris shoves to his feet; the air changes as he takes two steps to the door, stops, comes again to Hawke's side where she stands in the window's pale slender light.

He says, "Hawke."

She opens her eyes. He looks— _furious_ , and wounded, and bewildered beyond belief and—relieved, somehow, for an instant's shadow before it goes again. He holds his own wrist between them, the red band gone. Her mouth is so dry— "Fenris."

His hands lower to his chest, then unbend, his fingers opening like a morning bloom to reveal the bare skin of his marked wrist. She does not need to see it to know what it says. It was the first word she ever learned to write.

She can't breathe.

"This is your name," Fenris says. Then, demanding: "Hawke. This is _your name_."

The cliff gives way beneath her feet and she is falling, falling; she recoils, one hand over her face, the other fisted to keep from taking his in answer, to keep from mooring herself where she has been told already she has no home. "Oh, _flames_. Fenris. Fenris, I don't—I didn't—"

"You never told me."

"You never _asked!_ "

"Six years!" he snarls, his cheeks white with anger, and comes to meet her where she has backed against the window. "Venhedis, Hawke! You never once thought to mention it?"

She will not be cowed. Her hand is over her heart— "I have a name too, Fenris!" Leto. Leto. _Leto_!

His eyes drop to her hand, then come up again, anger easing, something else burning fiercer in its place. "And I have yours."

"You _left_!" she shouts. Something in her is breaking, tearing all her heart with it—

Fenris stiffens, his gaze flicking to the window behind her. She can still read part of the word wrapped around his dark wrist: _E-U-P-H—_ "If I'd known," he starts, his voice lower, "if I had known then…"

"You would have left anyway." She doesn't mean it as accusation, but he flinches all the same. "There's no need to lie to either of us."

"I did not mean—"

To see him angry hurts; to see him like this, fumbling for an explanation he cannot give, is worse. Hawke reaches up to touch his shoulder even as he moves to shove his hair from his eyes, and her fingers close around his wrist instead.

They go very still. Fenris's eyes are on her hand, huge and unblinking; she shifts to bare the name—her name, _her_ name, fine block letters just above where the lyrium branches into five delicate lines along his hand—and he shudders, color flooding back into his face again. The knuckles of his other hand rest on the windowsill at her hip; she gives the smallest pull and he comes so willingly, his fingers tangling with hers, his arms caging her where she's half-caught on the sill.

He says her name. It's low and rumbling and her stomach flips like a girl's to hear it so tenderly in his voice; then he says _"Hawke_ ," and that is better, _truer_ , because that is who she is, not the other, and she smiles despite herself and then—

Fenris kisses her.

After so long—it _hurts_ , made worse with his tentative care, his fingers brushing her hips, his proud nose against hers. "I need," he says against her mouth, his lips pressing to hers after every word, "to understand this."

"So do I," she answers, wrapping both arms around his neck. He tastes as she remembers; her heart has lodged somewhere behind her ribs, too stricken by surprise to beat. Almost three years—

He kisses her _hard_ , reserve giving way to impatience, and Hawke comes to meet him just as eagerly. His hands slide to her waist and he grips her tight enough she gasps his name—and then, like the silence after a blow that marks the instant just before pain, Fenris pulls away. He does not speak; he does not have to. She can read every word of it in his face.

He will not stay until he knows that Leto is forsworn. Hawke cannot yield Leto until she knows that Fenris will not leave. Impossible. They are fools both, to trust each other so completely except for this.

"Fenris," she says again, and he touches her cheek so carefully she thinks she must shatter. There is nothing else she can offer but herself; there is nothing she can take from him but the same, and here, it is not yet enough.

At last, so low she can barely hear it: "Danarius still lives. Let me kill him. Then, if I—if you…" He shakes his head at his own faltering; then his jaw sets with determination and he makes a decision that she can feel, and he kisses her one last time, carefully, until her heart is sore. "Wait for me, Hawke."

"I hate waiting."

He laughs. "I know."

Her chest is hot and floating, _Leto_ burning in her skin, hope carrying her higher even than that. It is a reason, if nothing else. She had not known how much she needed one. "I hope you tear the bastard to pieces."

A startled look, and then a real smile, and a nod, and then—he is gone.

Later, when Hawke can control her hands properly again, she lifts her mother's book from the place where it fell and turns to the last page. _Leandra_ in small, delicate script; and then, in her mother's handwriting, clear and strong: Euphemia, Bethany, Carver.

And after them all: _Hawke._

—

An elf woman sits in the Hanged Man, slender and graceful and bent as if the world has grown too heavy over the years. Her voice—Fenris _knows_ it, knows too the proud turn of her head when he calls her name. _A girl, red-haired, younger; she lets the tattered cloth fall shut behind her, closing away the glare of Tevinter's summer sunlight, her anger fading into shadow—_

_A slim woman with grief in her eyes, and gentle hands worn from long labor. His mother. Red-haired, younger—his sister. A narrow light on his wrist, cool fingers, soft and familiar._

_Hide it. Forget it, if you can. It will kill you otherwise._

_He will not forget—he will not forget—he will not—_

"I remember you," he breathes, astonished. "You called me—"

—

_Leto!_

—

Fenris had not known before that time could stop so totally without the use of magic to kill it. And yet here he stands, as motionless as a mirror-silent pool, staring from outside himself at this still reflection of his impossible, senseless life.

His master stands on the stairs, brought by his sister, the smile on his face the same easy cruelty Fenris remembers. Varania has _betrayed_ him, and Hawke—Hawke has stayed at his back, her fingers around his arm, holding him tight enough it hurts, her breath still caught on the instant before speaking—

"My little Fenris. Predictable as always."

His name is Leto.

"Fenris is a free man," snaps Hawke, and the pool's stillness _shatters_ , so much more than a ripple—a towering wave to tear the surface into froth and spume. His heart stumbles into life again and he gasps, drowning, trying to remember to breathe.

"And this is your new mistress?" Danarius's eyes drop to his slave, and then to his slave's wrist, and Fenris _remembers—_ bruised only there, beneath the scars— "I've heard of Kirkwall's lovely Champion. Euphemia, isn't it? I do hope our dear boy has shown you some of his more… remarkable talents."

He is lightheaded with too much all at once. Fury is safe— "Shut your mouth, Danarius!"

His master's lips thin. Once that would have sent him to his knees; now he straightens his back as Danarius descends, staff tapping on every step, fine grey silk brushing whispers over the Hanged Man's splintered stairs. "You think," he says softly, "that finding her changes anything between us? You are _mine_ , Fenris, body and mind and soul. You knew this, once. It pains me that I must teach you again."

"I am not a slave."

Danarius laughs. "As if invisible chains are not just as heavy. Tell me, woman. How did you feel to learn you bore the name of my slave?"

His name is _Leto._

"Honored," Hawke snarls, real anger shot through her voice like gold. Fenris draws in a breath—

The tip of Danarius's staff lights Fade-green. Fenris fires his own brands silver, and Hawke is at his back, and Isabela at the bar grinning as she unsheathes her daggers, and he can hear the creak of Bianca's gears at the top of the stairs—and the battle joins at last.

—

It is inevitable. A tide rising to swallow sand, washing away every trace of passing into nothing; a tree struck by lightning, split tip to root to bare the white-smooth core beneath.

His master's heart beats in his hand, twice, hard. Then it bursts like any man's, and Danarius slumps at Fenris's feet. Fenris stares, gasping, his master's blood on his face—

No. No master, not now, not ever. Danarius is dead.

Leto is dead, too. Has been dead ten years. It is time Fenris set him free.

—

It takes time, after, to sort through the confusion and old, lingering hatred, to ensure Varania will survive the city long enough to leave it. Hawke doesn't mind, though; Danarius has come and died and they have both survived it, will survive more than this now that they have a chance. A chance!

She links her fingers over her face, leaning back until her chair balances on two legs. It's the first time in the full day since Danarius died she has allowed herself to think of it. _Leto_. Leto, Fenris, Hawke, Euphemia. Isabela with her own name, secret and safe and forgotten; Anders, alias also, with the name on his back dead before him. And Varric parted from his, that pain kept silent, too; Merrill and Carver, only in these last six months exchanging letters with real intent behind the words, and even now Hawke does not know what Kirkwall has yet to bring between them.

Aveline and Donnic, married, content. And she—

The chair's front feet hit the ground with a thump. Hawke stands, deciding, her shoulders squared, her chin lifted. A joy she cannot name is surging in her heart, swallowing her up in light, and she doesn't try to keep back the grin as she catches up her staff and heads for the door.

She has waited long enough.

—

Fenris stands when she enters, sudden enough that Isabela huffs and rolls her eyes from her seat beneath the window. Hawke doesn't mean to interrupt, but Isabela is gone even before she can apologize, a knowing smile playing over her face, and then the door clicks closed and there Hawke stands with Fenris in the dim, dusty light of his chambers, the hearth unlit, his bed half-made, only three steps and a little time between them.

"Fenris," she says, and stops. It must be his choice. It must be him who says—

" _Hawke_."

Then his hands are on her shoulders and his mouth is over hers, and he is _smiling_ enough to make her laugh against his mouth. In this moment, it is all the answer she needs.

—

Eventually, after the best of the morning has seen them reunite, rest, and come together a second time, Fenris apologizes. It is easier than Hawke expects from him, as if he has considered the words too long; all the same there is naked apprehension in his face as he asks for her forgiveness.

Ha. Naked.

Still, despite her initial inclination to store this moment as safeguard against any future unpleasant impulses, his eyes are too green and his skin too warm for her to let him suffer long. Certainly they are too comfortable together, her leg thrown over his, her weight reclined on his chest, her head on his shoulder. Besides, she forgave him long ago.

She tells him most of this to make him laugh, and he does, his mouth curving in a smile true enough to take her breath away. It's a very kissable mouth with that smile, and Hawke does not disoblige; then she leans back again, sighing, sore and pleased to be so. His hand comes along hers where it rests on his thigh, his dark, strong fingers a pleasant contrast to her own, and she sees again the raised, even letters that wrap his bare wrist like a cuff—or a shackle.

She doesn't want to know. She must ask. "Fenris."

"Hawke."

"Do you wish—" she starts, and then the words die in her throat, susceptible even now to her own cowardice. She closes her eyes, feels the strong slender _E_ pass beneath the pad of her thumb. "Otherwise?"

She feels more than hears him laugh. He frees his hand from hers, moves his fingers to her chin until her face is turned up to his. He says, "Hawke. It was you, first."

She breathes out, deep and slow, a flicker of that same relentless gladness arching high behind her ribs. Her fingers come up to touch _Leto_ , half in habit, half in reassurance; Fenris's eyes drop to her skin to follow the scars, and then he sighs, his chest giving beneath her back. No fear, though; no bitterness. It is a triumph she had not expected.

Still. She says, "What?"

His mouth crooks. "The name on you is not my name. It was once, though, and I wondered…" He shakes his head at himself, abandoning the thought. "I will not be ruled by fate."

" _Fate_ ," Hawke snorts, turning until her forehead is buried just beneath his jaw. The lyrium thrums gently with every breath; his heart beats strong in her ears, unfaltering. "I have not been Euphemia since my father died. Perhaps she and Leto were the ones meant for each other instead."

"Perhaps they will fade, as others do."

She grins despite herself, wonders when she learned his voice so well. "Jealous? I haven't even left you yet. It _is_ my turn, isn't it?"

"Hawke," he says, half-serious in the reprimand.

"Fine. I suppose I could always have it tattooed on, if you like."

"Hawke!"

The laugh that bursts out of her startles them both, and before she can wonder at her own happiness she twists in Fenris's arms, her bare chest against his, her hands cupping his jaw, her mouth on his mouth. " _Fenris,_ " she echoes, too full with the sight of him, the smell, the taste, the inexplicable joy so near grief of having the one she loves safe at last in her arms, and her in his. His hand spreads heavy and warm over her back, following the bare curve up to her neck and then into her hair, and there he holds her as she kisses him until she is almost senseless and they are both beyond all doubt.

"Fenris," she says again, softly, when she can. "We made a choice. That's all."

His eyes close, come open again with wry humor. "So simple as that?"

"Well. A few side trips, here and there, into emotional devastation and truly unfortunate twists of irony."

"I am named to the strongest mage I have ever known. Is that not irony?"

"Sounds about right for the two of us." Hawke kisses him again, and then his dear, straight nose, and his heavy dark brows. "I'll keep Leto all the same, though, if it's all right with you. Until you're ready to let him go. I've been rather attached to him since I turned fourteen."

"Hawke," he says, low, smiling, and she loves him, she loves him, she _loves_ him with every part of her, no matter what she is called, no matter what _he_ is called. Perhaps, she thinks, this is what Andraste had meant for them to know after all.

He tells her, steady as the earth, "I am yours."

He has chosen. So has she.

—

_Juliet._

What's in a name? That which we call a rose  
By any other word would smell as sweet.  
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,  
Retain that dear perfection which he owes  
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,  
And for that name, which is no part of thee  
Take all myself.

—

end.


End file.
